Archive for the ‘Gifts’ Category

Pinned with Pride

September 11, 2026

[I started this posting a few days ago, but was balked from moving ahead by bad juju in both Facebook and WordPress. The curses magically lifted on 9/9. So I’m back on task now, but it’s 9/11 (25th anniversary) and apparently I’m going to be weeping non-stop all day, while I plug away at my work. Life lurches on]

Yet another birthday present for me, small but touching: two small enamel lapel pins: one in the form of a flag, one a plain rectangle (both are just an inch across):


(#1) The flag pin


(#2) The rectangle pin

Both of them from the program director Manalee Shukla here at Avant (a friend I’ve posted about several times, because we share a pleasure in the culture of her native land, India, and because she appreciates my injecting a note of gay spice into the Avant experience (meanwhile, I’ve warned her that her two bicultural kids are about to finish a transformation into entirely American boys; I have plenty of sociolinguistic stories from personal experience as well as the literature — all that professional preparation turns out to be genuinely useful in daily life).

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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Flags, Gifts, Homosexuality, Logos, Moral worlds, My life, Penguins, Quotations, Rainbow clothing, Signs and symbols, Taboo language and slurs | Leave a Comment »

The fortuitous guest gift

December 15, 2025

The sinus-infection background, from yesterday’s posting “Chair-ridden”:

The [long-running, like for weeks] sinus infection isn’t contagious, and I don’t run a fever, But it’s fiercely painful, produces prodigious amounts of disgusting junk I cough up constantly, and is, alas, not much affected by nasal saline sprays. Mostly, it’s unbelievably tiring. Hence, my being chair-ridden (the analogue of bed-ridden).

Now I’m going to amble discursively through the rest of this story. Walk with me.

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Posted in Books, German, Gifts, Language and food, Language and medicine, My life | 5 Comments »

What men actually want for Christmas

December 5, 2025

A short video that came by me this morning, with some guy’s idea (off the top of his head) of the top five things that men actually want for Christmas; you really don’t want to see the original source. The larger point is that such a list is a distillation of someone’s beliefs about what men are really like — or, more accurately, what real men, normative men, are like.

I would prefer to think of it as a list of things men might not have thought of themselves. So: not want they really want, but what they might like yet might not know about or have thought of getting for themselves. That makes more sense. Ranking the items makes no sense at all.

I am, of course, far off normative American masculinity, so recommendations for such a person pretty much just slide off me, as they do in the annual lists for Fathers Day.

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Posted in Gifts, Holidays, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »